A beginner full-body workout, three days a week

Why full body, not a split

A split divides your body across different days: chest on Monday, back on Wednesday, legs on Friday. It's how most gym content is written. It suits someone who has been lifting for a year or two.

The reason is frequency. Early progress comes from practising the movement. Squatting three times a week gives you 12 squat sessions a month to get better at squatting. A leg day gives you four. The lifts are new to you, so repetition is worth more than volume right now.

Full body is also more forgiving of a missed session. Skip a day on a split and a whole muscle group waits a week. Skip a day here and you shift the rotation by one.

The workout

Three sets of everything, and stop each set with two reps left in you.

Five reps for the barbell squat, bench press and overhead press. Eight to ten for the Romanian deadlift, dumbbell row and lat pulldown. Thirty seconds for the plank.

Rest two to three minutes between sets on the heavy lifts and about 90 seconds on everything else. Beginners consistently rest too little, then wonder why set three is so much worse than set one. If you're still breathing hard, wait.

The whole session should take 45 to 55 minutes. If it's taking 90, you're resting too long between exercises, not between sets.

Adding weight

Add weight every session you complete all three sets.

Add 10 lb to lower body lifts, which here means the barbell squat and the Romanian deadlift. Add 5 lb to upper body lifts: bench press, overhead press, and the rows and pulldowns. Lower body uses more muscle and tolerates bigger jumps.

That's roughly 30 lb a month on the squat. That rate lasts a few months and then slows. When you miss reps at the same weight two sessions running, drop back 10 percent and climb again. The first time that happens is usually somewhere between month two and month four, and it means you ran the program long enough to reach its end.

If the equipment is taken

Every exercise here has swaps, so a busy gym never costs you a session.

If the rack is taken, the barbell squat becomes the leg press or the hack squat. The bench press becomes the dumbbell bench press or the machine chest press. The overhead press becomes the dumbbell shoulder press. The Romanian deadlift becomes the stiff-legged dumbbell deadlift. The lat pulldown becomes pull-upsor chin-up if you can do them.

Swapping costs you almost nothing. Six minutes standing next to an occupied rack usually costs you the session.

What to add once this feels easy

After about a month, most people want to add arm work. That's fine, and it goes at the end, never at the start.

Add two exercises, one per workout, three sets of 10 to 15. A barbell curl on workout A and a triceps pushdown on workout B covers it. If your shoulders are the thing you care about, a side lateral raise works instead.

Resist adding a fifth compound lift. The four in each session already cover everything, and the most common way a beginner program dies is by growing into a 90-minute session nobody wants to show up for.

If you miss a session

Miss one session and shift the rotation. If you were due A and skipped it, do A next time. Don't try to make it up by doubling.

Miss a full week and repeat the last weight you completed instead of continuing to climb. Miss a month and drop back about 20 percent and rebuild. You'll be back to where you were inside three weeks, which is much faster than the first climb took.

Nothing here breaks from a missed session. People quit over one, which is the actual risk.

When to stop running this

Run this until adding weight stops working for a month or so, then change.

For most people that's somewhere between four and eight months in. At that point an upper/lower split or a push/pull/legs rotation starts to make sense, because you can now handle enough weight that squatting three times a week is genuinely hard to recover from.

Until then, changing programs is the most popular way to make no progress. The one you're running is almost always better than the one you're about to read about.